For The Sun Magazine, Lisa Glatt recounts a difficult relationship with her mother, who died of breast cancer. This is the story of a mother and daughter who struggled to see eye-to-eye after a freak car accident changed Glatt’s life irrevocably, and the ever-downward rollercoaster of metastatic cancer eventually took her mother’s life.
We were two and a half years in when my mom started planning for a complicated reconstructive surgery that involved grafting tissue from her stomach onto her chest. This was in the early nineties, prior to advances that would offer hope for many breast-cancer patients, and her prognosis was bleak—large tumor with lymph node involvement. The chance that her cancer would return before she recovered from the reconstruction was high, and I worried she’d suffer through a lengthy convalescence only to be struck down again. I begged her to wait a year.
Wait for what? she said, irritated. Her hair had grown back in thick curls, and her stamina had returned. She had a natural breast on one side and a concave, leathery remnant on the other. She wanted to forget having been sick, while I was in the next room, sobbing like she was already gone. Just a few months later we’d discover that the cancer had metastasized to her hip.
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Ditch
“He was always helping someone through something, even when he was barely holding on himself.”
After All This
“When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban . . . we became complicit.”
Off Camera
“So I tiptoed through life, aware that my obsessive enthusiasm could set people off like a bomb.”
